#recklessness reflected

It was a slow day. Not that the Hog’s Head really had any particularly bustling ones, a busy day generally entailed a handful of adventurous and loud children down from the castle pretending to be older than they were much to the annoyance and vague distain of the rest of the occupants of the pub. An average day at the pub was a quiet one, and so when the Hog’s Head was slow, it was slow. Aberforth had ducked into the back room half an hour ago, and promptly found himself sitting on a rickety and lopsided chair that had found it’s way in among the boxes full of alcohol and other, less important, supplies. At which point, the only reasonable thing to do had been to take a nap. 

It was, legs propped up, crossed, on a box before him, with one arm across his torso and the other dangling, that Aberforth slipped back into wakefulness once again. It wasn’t noise from the main part of the pub that had woken him- it was quiet, still. It wasn’t any sort of explosion, or someone hammering down his door. Aberforth blinked awake, and peered down his nose at the goat pressing her nose forcefully into his palm so as to nibble carefully on the end of his sleeve. 

“Callie.” His voice was gruff, as it almost exclusively was, but when speaking to his goats with no one else around to hear, there was a tenderness to Aberforth that the outside world hadn’t been allowed a glimpse of in decades. He extracted his sleeve from her grip gently, and moved to stand, fingers brushing thoughtlessly, fondly, over the top of the goat’s head. “Should we go check in on the bastards in the front, then?” The question was quiet, half to himself, but Aberforth paused as if to allow for an answer from the goat, glancing down at her, before moving towards the door. 

Plucking a couple of bottles of fire whiskey out of a box so as to look like he had actually been doing something in his absence, Aberforth pushed open the door back to the space behind the bar of the Hog’s Head with his foot. He stopped, framed by the door, both to cast a glance over the interior to ensure nothing had exploded whilst he napped and also to let Callie trot through the door after him and wander down the back of the bar, snuffling the ground thoughtfully. He let the door swing shut and walked in the same direction Callie had, sliding the bottles of fire whiskey into place on a row of shelves and looking speculatively over at one occupant of his bar who had decidedly not been there before he had ducked into the backroom for a fairly extended time and a very brief nap. 

“Prewett. You going to order a drink or just sit around taking up room?”